Conduct Report on Professor Ishinaka

[Dan Sallitt]

At first glance, this episodic 1950 film about the comical
interactions of the residents of rural Aomori Prefecture seems as if
it would be up Naruse’s alley. But one quickly senses that Naruse
didn’t control the script, and the film’s comedy of foibles has so
little depth that the director rarely gets any traction. Based on a
collection of short stories by popular novelist Yôjirô Ishizaka (who
also provided source material for Naruse’s 1939 SINCERITY and 1955
WOMEN'S WAYS, as well as for Shiro Toyoda’s excellent 1937 YOUNG
PEOPLE) and adapted by Yasutaro Yagi (writer of Naruse’s A DESCENDANT
OF URASHIMA TARO and a number of Tomu Uchida’s films), the film seems
to be trading on the audience’s familiarity with Ishizaka: the titular
character Ishinaka (Miyata Shigeo, looking a lot like photos of the
real-life Ishizaka), plays a famous writer who intrudes on the lives
of locals to solve their problems or to gather material for his
books. Not only does this detached character give Naruse little
emotional life to work with, but most of the principals of the film’s
three vignettes also possess just enough character traits to allow
them to be pitted against each other in familiar comic
configurations. Naruse doesn’t give up on the material, and when the
final episode, “The Story of a Carriage of Hay,” gives him a bit more
to play with in the way of hidden emotions and motivations, he makes
the most of the unspoken attraction between an unwitting visitor to
the countryside (Setsuko Wakayama) and a taciturn farmer’s son
(Toshiro Mifune), at least until Ishinaka’s arrival relegates the
story to “rural drollery” (to borrow from the title of Ishizaka’s
short story collection). If Naruse’s dramatic instincts are blocked,
his visual flair is unimpeded, and the film is replete with lovely
afternoon light and beautiful photography of groups against
landscapes. There’s even a bit of the surrealist editing that Naruse
enjoys on occasion, as the sudden irruption of fireworks into a
naturalistic scene is revealed to be part of a movie that the
characters attend; while another amusingly rushed scene transition is
driven by a cutaway to a clock revealing that the characters need to
get to the next location.